The Sardonyx Net (70 page)

Dana's medallion gleamed gold against his cream-colored suit. He touched it; he had thought it lost in the debris of Michel A-Rae's house. Rhani smiled at the gesture. She was wearing blue-and-silver, Yago colors. She slipped her arm through his. “Are you so glad to be leaving, Starcaptain?”
 

“Yes, Domna, I am,” he said. “After all, I've wanted to leave since I got here.”
 

“Will you go home, to Pellin?”
 

He shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe I'll go to Nexus.”
 

“So that you can meet Tori Lamonica, and run more drugs?” she teased.
 

“Oh, no,” he said. “Not that. Never again.” He smiled. “Hell, I'm going to look for legal work.” Rhani mimed shock. He slipped his arm around her shoulders. Her hip kissed his. Once that delicate contact had been enough to make him stumble, but no longer.... He found himself glancing at her waist. She chuckled.
 

“Impatient man,” she said. Sliding from his grasp, she stretched her fists to the light. “Ah, I almost wish I were going with you.”
 

“No, you don't,” he said. “You can't leave Chabad now. Your work is just beginning.”
 

“True.” She dropped her arms to her sides. A bubble circled overhead in a lazy spiral, awaiting permission to land. She said, “I have a dorazine factory to find a site for, a resolution to shepherd through the Council, and a party to go to. It's Imre Kyneth's seventy-eighth birthday.”
 

Dana remembered Immeld saying, “
They don't celebrate birthdays at all, on Chabad!
” “I thought Chabadese didn't celebrate birthdays,” he said.
 

Rhani smiled. “True. But the Kyneths do.”
 

Stars, he thought: I know so little about this world, and here I am leaving it. For the twentieth time, he nudged the bag at his foot. In it were an auditor, three tapes Rhani had given him of Vittorio Stratta's music, a few bits of clothing, and a certificate which returned the ownership of one MPL starship from Family Yago to Starcaptain Dana Ikoro.
Zipper
was his. In a short time—a very short time—he would ride a shuttle to the moon where she waited for him, fueled, tested, rebuilt, and ready to go.
 

“I would send best wishes if I thought he would remember me,” Dana said.
 

“Imre might,” Rhani said seriously. “He remembers people.”
 

“Even slaves?”
 

“Even slaves.” She stroked his arm. “You have no scar. I'm glad.”
 

Bleakly he said, “There are other scars.”
 

She flinched, and he was sorry. “I didn't say it,” he said.
 

“You didn't say it,” she agreed. But he had. He was not thinking of himself, but Michel A-Rae. The former Hype cop lay in the Abanat Clinic, under heavy guard. Dana no longer hated the Enchantean. It was hard to hate someone when you knew that he had spent ten minutes being torn to bloody strips by Zed Yago's merciless hands.
 

Catriona Graeme, on finding A-Rae, had wanted to charge Zed with assault. Rhani had had to do some clever talking to get her brother out of that. She had pointed out to the mercenary that although A-Rae was under the jurisdiction of the Hype cops at the time of the incident, he was still an Enchantean citizen and thus the “assault” could technically only be tried in a Chabadese court. Even Catriona Graeme agreed that it would be hard to get a Chabadese court to prosecute the case. Dana glanced behind them—Zed was standing in a pillar's shade, watching the shuttleship load. He wondered what would happen to A-Rae. If Rhani's resolution failed he would be returned to Nexus for trial; if it passed, he'd be tried on Chabad. Poor bastard, Dana thought.
 

He was pretty sure the resolution would pass.
 

The signal chimed two notes:
bing-bong!
“That's the call to the shuttle,” he said. “I have to go.”
 

“Yes,” said Rhani. Dana picked up the bag. The sun made Rhani's hair seem waxed. Turning toward the pillar, Dana lifted a hand. Zed's left sleeve moved; it might have been a wave. I'm free now, Dana thought, for the hundredth time. You can't touch me. And he wondered—also for the hundredth time—why he had promised Rhani that he would come back.
 

He would, though. Not soon; but in six years, or ten—a long time, anyway.
 

“Good-bye,” Rhani said. “I'll write to you.”
 

“Yes. Send me a picture.”
 

“I will,” she said. “More than one.”
 

“Send one of yourself, too.”
 

She grinned. “You think you'll want one, once you're off my world?”
 

“I'll want one,” he said, wondering what his child would look like, wondering what Rhani would look like, in two or three or six or ten years.
 

The signal belled a second time, and third. She pushed him. “Go!” Bag in hand, he loped toward the shuttleship. A crew member waved both arms from the top of the ramp. Dana broke into a run toward the tall ship that would take him to the moon, to his starship, home—to the irrestistible clouds and the surging carmine currents of the Hype.